Matrix Games Forums

taltamir you hit the nail on the head.

I suppose I see it like this: If you want the player to macro-manage, he needs to trust his AI to do the work and have good high level reports; if you want the player to micro-manage, you need to present him with the tools and detail he needs to do this.

To some extent, this game tries to do both, which is great, but that means they need the AI and information to support both modes of play.

I still have high hopes. I think the game has gotten only better with the updates. The econ fix should not be too hard. I dont care too much about the econ details as long as I have sufficient resources to run my empire.

ORIGINAL: Gertjan

I still have high hopes. I think the game has gotten only better with the updates. The econ fix should not be too hard. I dont care too much about the econ details as long as I have sufficient resources to run my empire.

I just replied to Gertjan on a different thread about making money in 1.04. That was about not turning the game into a spreadsheet. I agreed I don't want the game played from a spreadsheet, but otherwisw disagree that having more information is a bad thing.

The only way to make the Macro/automated and Micro/manual both work is to have some way of proving to the player that it is working. It MAY be working now, but I can't tell if it is, or if it is dumb luck.

In my opinion, individual aspects should have individual AI doctrines governing them and each and every AI would have a certain sort of minor link to another AI i.e. like the ship-building AI periodically checks on the economy AI to see if it has enough funds and income to support a new fleet. When all these individual AIs work in sync, you get an overall emerging intelligence which is able to emulate closely human behavior with regards to economical tweaking and fleet control.

This overall intelligence is not programmed by default. Rather, it is a behavior that arises due to many different individual AIs working in coordination with each other. It is akin to group behavior characteristics of humans where each person is an individual who determines his own actions, yet a group of individuals set to a task can seem to move coherently (as a unified group) towards the completion of said task despite all that individualism.

Doing this also allows a high level of interactivity as you can manually turn on/off specific individual AIs governing specific areas for player control and the rest of the AI can still adapt to whatever the player does since their decision making is impacted by the actions done in other areas, regardless of whether it was an AI or a human player.

With respect to this economy-AI issue, i can only guess that the economical AI was not well integrated with the other aspects of the game such as fleet/ship management and things like available supply/demand of luxury goods, current development level of worlds etc. and as a result, the AI just goes right ahead doing whatever it was programmed to do i.e. colonise any available worlds, build the usual mining bases all round etc. and that crashes the economy

ORIGINAL: Gargoil

ORIGINAL: Gertjan

I still have high hopes. I think the game has gotten only better with the updates. The econ fix should not be too hard. I dont care too much about the econ details as long as I have sufficient resources to run my empire.

I just replied to Gertjan on a different thread about making money in 1.04. That was about not turning the game into a spreadsheet. I agreed I don't want the game played from a spreadsheet, but otherwisw disagree that having more information is a bad thing.

The only way to make the Macro/automated and Micro/manual both work is to have some way of proving to the player that it is working. It MAY be working now, but I can't tell if it is, or if it is dumb luck.

Naturally having more information is a good thing, so if you WANT to play excel spreadsheet the spreadsheetening you could. Some people like that.
But the priority should be to fix the AI automation first.

It's hard to argue against being able to check out the profitability of bases and freighters. But, there again, presenting this information won't help either, because you can't do anything about it.

ORIGINAL: concern

It's hard to argue against being able to check out the profitability of bases and freighters. But, there again, presenting this information won't help either, because you can't do anything about it.

I respectfully disagree again. You design your bases. You decided if and where to build them. You decide where to colonize, where to mine, how to defend your territory, what research gives you. Half the spending of your empire is in your control. You set tax rates, which affects immigration (greatly if you set new colonies to zero).

I'd say we have quite a bit of control over profitability. What we don't have is much information to help make the right decisions.

Sorry, I was unclear in my previous message. The way I am currently playing, I am allowing the AI to control my constructors - a valid approach to playing as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, the AI isn't making wise choices in 1.04.

Somehow you need to be able to influence the private economy (and the AI), without actually interfering.

ORIGINAL: Gargoil

ORIGINAL: concern

It's hard to argue against being able to check out the profitability of bases and freighters. But, there again, presenting this information won't help either, because you can't do anything about it.

I respectfully disagree again. You design your bases. You decided if and where to build them. You decide where to colonize, where to mine, how to defend your territory, what research gives you. Half the spending of your empire is in your control. You set tax rates, which affects immigration (greatly if you set new colonies to zero).

I'd say we have quite a bit of control over profitability. What we don't have is much information to help make the right decisions.

Lets see...

You design your bases - You could, I leave it on auto design but its manageable if you want to. However this has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. You personally designing a base isn't going to magically make mines profitable and inexpensive.

You decided if and where to build them - no you don't, the AI builds them, thats the whole point.

You decide where to colonize - correct

where to mine - wrong, the AI does; mining ships are all private.

how to defend your territory - irrelevant to the discussion, what does that have to do with income? besides, you obviously set this to auto and control individual fleets while the AI takes care of system defense.

what research gives you - now you are just way off track. You have ZERO control over research other then to "crash" individual research items on occasion.

Half the spending of your empire is in your control - So what?

You set tax rates - Are you insane? Setting tax rate manually is way too much work on even a medium sized empire...

So basically:
Optional but probably not, wrong, correct, wrong, irrelevant, very wrong, irrelevant, wrong.

Some of the things you said are not even ALLOWED for you to control, EX: research.
And most of the other stuff is left to automation (because its impractical to control manually...

Besides which, you deciding where to build a mining base (Assuming you are on full manual) doesn't matter because you do NOT KNOW how profitable it will be until you actually BUILD the damn thing. AND YOU CANNOT RETIRE PRIVATE STRUCTURES...
As such, there is not a DAMN THING you can do about an non profitable mining base...

well, there is actually one thing, if you have a mining base on a colonizeable planet, colonizing it destroys the mining base (and mines for you)... turning a liability into an asset.